


Nightfall

by crazyjane



Series: SpookyVIXX October 2020 [10]
Category: VIXX
Genre: Darkness, Gen, Nightmares, SpookyVIXX October
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:33:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27298705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyjane/pseuds/crazyjane
Summary: There are nights when he feels the dark swirling up against his windows like some sinuous, tentacled animal ...Tonight is bad.
Series: SpookyVIXX October 2020 [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1955065
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	Nightfall

**Author's Note:**

> Just a couple of quick ones to finish ...
> 
> prompt: shadow

_The creaking is the house settling,  
Not the pacing of restless ghosts;  
The rumble is only traffic,  
Not the stirring of a cellar monster;  
The rustle outside the door  
is not the dead come knocking._

Hongbin’s house is a haven of light. There are no dark corners, not even in the cupboards and the drawers. He paid for the wiring, the bulbs, the independent power supply (in case the grid failed, just a precaution), ignoring the raised eyebrows and smirks from the electricians he’d hired. When they left, he methodically checked each one, noticing the brightness and adjusting the angles of reflecting mirrors to banish every shadow.

His curtains are sensibly shut. The windows do not open. He sealed those himself. He has HEPA-filtered, climate-controlled air.

He keeps flashlights in convenient places. He could find them with his eyes shut. Sometimes, his heart pounding, breathing fast and shallow, he does just that, tests himself. Six steps and reach down in this room. Turn left, three steps, head high shelf in the next.

He likes loud, defiant music that he uses to fill the spaces and form a bitter defence against his enemy.

There are nights when he feels the dark swirling up against his windows like some sinuous, tentacled animal – but when he is finally driven to yank aside the curtains, there is only the suspiciously blank face of the night looking back at him. On those nights, he dreams of teeth and claws and blood, and of screams echoing in empty corridors. Sometimes he wakes, sweating and trembling, and sees eyes – black eyes, soft and dangerous, that regard him with an inhuman patience as though they know that sooner or later, the light must fail.

Tonight is bad. He sees a light flicker, and rushes to replace it, afraid it will somehow affect the rest. His hands are clumsy and the spent bulb slips, shatters on the gleaming, tiled floor. He forces himself to stop, to breathe, reaches up. His fingers brush against the live socket and he is thrown across the room to smash into the wall. He twitches uncontrollably. His heart was pounding a moment ago – now there is a growing silence, and he feels something opening up to swallow him. Something dark. The lights are going out, one by one, and he cannot scream.

It presses at him, coils against him. Calls his name in a rasping, hitching voice. He cannot see but its face is in his mind – twisted, distorted, nothing natural but he knows it, he’s always seen it in his dreams, behind his eyes. The voice of the sewer, the face in the alley, the dark, what he has run from all his life. He begs, silently, but it is in him, in his throat, his ears, entering every part of him, violating him utterly, nothing untouched. Claimed.

A broken doll lying against the wall, Hongbin stares into the dark.


End file.
